God Don't Like Ugly

by Tony Robles/PNN

I was riding Muni the other day. An African descendent sister sat nearby. Suddenly she said aloud, "God don't like ugly". I thought about those words. I wondered who first uttered them. Perhaps a poor person, a person removed from their land or perhaps it was a person wrongly incarcerated. I glanced at the other passengers. They stared straight ahead. It was as if the woman's words met deaf ears. I heard them. They touched my heart and mind.

Senior Action Network (www.senioractionnetwork.org) recently honored Mission District elder Jose Morales for his long fight against displacement and gentrification. Jose was evicted from his Mission District home courtesy the Ellis Act--a place he had called home for over 40 years. Jose fought for more than a decade to keep his home while his landlord fought to take it off the market for the purpose of converting it into a condominium. Folks from the community sat in Jose's kitchen listening to this elder describe his long struggle--the clock ticking in the background. Jose talked about the harassment of his landlord. The weight of the fight and the struggle and the harassment could be seen in Jose's bent back. We waited for the sheriff.

And what of the countless numbers of tenants, elders, people with mental and/or physical disabilities who have suffered from the physical and emotional stress of landlord harassment? Cases of harassment are well-documented--residential burglary, severed phone lines, sawing holes in floors, stalking, mysterious fires, etc.

San Francisco currently has no laws protecting tenants from harassment. The rent board does not involve itself in such cases. Presently the only thing tenants can do to fight is to document harassment, which might be over a period of months or years. Once the abuse has been documented as being so egregious as to cause physical, mental or financial damages--can the tenant then file a lawsuit.

Proposition M will add an important section to San Francisco's rent control law a section that will define and ban harassment. Prop M would give tenants a rent reduction when harassed. It will also give tenants attorney's fees to fight eviction attempts. Longtime tenant advocate Tommi Avicolli Mecca of the Housing Rights Committee (www.hrcsf.org) sees prop M as necessary. "Prop M gives tenants a tool for fighting landlord harassment. Currently, we don't have much that we can do when a landlord is tring to pressure us into leaving our apartment or is making it extremely uncomfortable for us to live there. Putting this in the rent ordinance makes perfect sense, its where most of our rights as rent-controlled tenants are already stored. This is a very important proposition--particularly for elders on fixed incomes who should be honored and cared for,not harassed. As the sister on Muni said, "God don't like ugly".

Author's note: To see a video of Senior Action Network's 17th annual convention, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuuIA-MMUSI